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18/11/2013

Daleks - Invasion Radio: 1966 A.D.

by Tim Worthington

With all of the excitement about the recent recovery of `The Enemy Of The
World` and `The Web Of Fear`, and the subsequent deserved focusing of attention
on those intrepid individuals who actually hunt down long-forgotten film cans
(and not just Doctor Who ones either
- there are lots of people out there trying to find other equally deserving
lost programmes, who never seem to get the credit, publicity or assistance they
really should), it's worth indulging in a spot of cheerleading for the much
smaller band of enthusiasts who devote their time to hunting down stray
recordings of lost radio shows.

Daleks lost in the Broadcasting House corridors

What's that? You didn't even know there was any missing radio? Well, that's
understandable. Radio's been far less prominent than most other media for a
long time now, and the relative ease of storing recorded sound would not
unreasonably lead you to assume that pretty much everything has been kept since
those pioneering days of 'Uncle Mac' telling stories about the Yompity Yo or
something. Yet it's that same compactness and reusability that has led to big
archival gaps in all kinds of shows - some of which you'd be really surprised
by - right up into the early nineties. You may think that the history of the
Film and Videotape archives is complicated, but up until John Birt instigated a
consolidation with an eye on an eventual move to digital archive repeat
stations in the mid-nineties, the BBC's audio output was mostly scattered
around a dizzying maze of smaller departmental archives - a main Sound Archive
did exist but was still very picky about what 'prestige' material it opted to
retain, even shunning Radio 1's repeated offers to send over sessions by The
Rolling Stones et al - and along the way a lot of material had been lost,
recorded over, or just plain not recorded in the first place.

With a bit of luck and persistence, it's possible to eventually find just
about anything that went out after home recording became widespread, from Nick
Drake's lone Peel session to Chris Morris' Radio 1 debut in 1990 to Radio 3
sitcom (yes, you did read that right) Patterson to even individual news reports
and one-off dramas, and I can attest to having my own personal Philip Morris
moment on discovering a set of C60s containing the missing-since-broadcast
first series of early Stephen Fry vehicle Delve Special, which somehow failed
to make the lead item on the Nine O'Clock News. Ah well, have a listen next time
it's on Radio 4 Extra. Anyway, the point of all of this preamble is to get
around to the fact that there's quite a lot of Doctor Who-related radio
appearances currently missing but doubtless out there on some unsuspecting
fan's dust-gathering collection of cassettes.

No, really. If you thought that long-lost promotional appearances by Wendy
Padbury and Frazer Hines on Crackerjack, The Daleks on The Sky At Night and
Celation from The Daleks' Master Plan on Points Of View were exciting, just you
wait until you start delving into the long history of Doctor Who-related radio
plugs. There's still plenty around now - in fact, there were still plenty even
when the show was off the air - but it's really just a fraction of what went on
in the sixties, when BBC1 and BBC2 were still only broadcasting for a couple of
hours a day and the BBC as a whole were still subject to pretty draconian rules
about how loudly they were allowed to promote themselves. It made sense to use
radio, which still had nearly as big an audience as television, to alert
viewers to forthcoming shows, and indeed ITV would do much the same with what
was at the time pretty much the only non-BBC radio broadcaster servicing the UK
(well, apart from the pirate stations), Radio Luxembourg; have a bit of a look
around online and you'll find, for example, Barry Gray playing some incidental
music from Fireball XL5 live in their studios to promote the launch of the
series later that day.

As you can imagine, very little of this was retained by the BBC in any form,
and a couple of related radio shows - notably William Hartnell's appearance on
Desert Island Discs in 1965 - are about as well-known as lost radio gets. The
producers of BBC Audio's Doctor Who At The BBC compilations have done an
excellent job of rounding up off-air recordings retained by fans of otherwise
non-extant broadcasts, from Matthew Waterhouse appearing on Radio 1's 'younger
listeners' show Playground to plug Full Circle all the way to a bizarre
appearance by Jon Pertwee and Ageddor at the 1974 Goodwood Races, but as
welcome as these are, they have all tended to be from the early seventies
onwards. Who-related sixties radio seems to be just that harder to track down,
meaning that we're denied the pleasure of hearing Frazer Hines plug his single
Who Is Dr Who? on the newly-launched Radio 1 (a pleasure that would have ended
the second that the record started), Verity Lambert and Terry Nation reflecting
on the first rush of Dalekmania and bigging up the forthcoming Voord to a
doubtless very bemused Home Service presenter, and the most intriguing-sounding
of them all; a condensed adaptation of the second Dalek film.

"You WILL come with me to the radio station.."

Apparently beginning some time in 1961, and running right up until The
Light Programme was split up and redeveloped into Radios 1 and 2 in September
1967, Movietime was a regular Friday night half hour slot, usually broadcast at
7pm. It presented truncated narrated versions of the soundtracks of recent
cinema films that had nonetheless completed their rounds of the nation's
picture palaces, yet were still too new to find their way onto television; in
those days there was a ruling that films could not be shown on TV for at the
very least five years after their initial release, and A Hard Day's Night, for
example, had to wait until 1970 for its first television showing, by which time
The Beatles had actually split up. Films given the Movietime treatment included
1965 Goose Sanctuary melodrama Those Calloways, 1964 love-and-racism Hayley
Mills vehicle The Moon-Spinners, and on 18th November 1966, Daleks - Invasion
Earth: 2150 A.D..

Narrated by film critic Gordon Gow - one of the more highbrow practitioners
of the art, though he became a favourite with listeners through his voluble
appearances on a succession of radio arts shows - and produced by Tony Luke, a
Light Programme veteran who had overseen their first ever live phone-in, as
you're probably imagining this took the form of plot-driving snatches of
dialogue interspersed with narration over relatively lengthy stretches of music
and effects. The effect was probably quite similar, if you've ever heard it, to
the Century 21 Records soundtrack of the final episode of The Chase. While this
probably all seems quite meaningless and maybe even pointless in an age when
you can get both of the films on DVD and online streaming services and they're
on Channel 4 every third Sunday anyway, at the time it was doubtless a pretty
exciting reminder of a film that had enjoyed a couple of weeks of cinema
exposure earlier in the year, and would not be seen again for some considerable
time after that. It was only really with the coming of home video and the
relaxing of TV movie broadcast regulations that this situation started to
change, and even then it didn't really have any effect until the early
nineties. If you've ever wondered why the Monty Python albums and books sold in
such ludicrous quantities, well there's your answer.

Interestingly, this wasn't the only attempt at bringing the controversial
Peter Cushing incarnation of The Doctor to the small, erm, speaker in 1966. A
company called Stanmark Productions, who produced a number of drama serials for
Radio Luxembourg and overseas commercial stations, had planned to record a
series featuring Cushing alongside film Susan Roberta Tovey and the mysterious
'Mike', in a similar vein to the adapation of The Avengers which would appear
on commercial radio in the early seventies. This got as far as the recording of
a long-lost pilot episode, which failed to get the all-important thumbs-up from
the BBC (and it's doubtful that Terry Nation would have given his approval to
the proposed use of Daleks), and the project went no further. Some sources have
speculated that the Movietime presentation was a hasty replacement for an
intended broadcast of this pilot, but in this writer's opinion that is
unlikely; although the pilot ran to twenty five minutes, Movietime was a long
established show and the BBC were not really in the habit of using independent
radio productions in those days, and it's likely that any resultant series would
have followed Stanmark's other serials onto the likes of Radio Luxembourg.

Excitingly, at the time of writing, it has just been suggested that a copy
of the Movietime episode might have survived after all, as a presumably
slightly truncated disc made for overseas sales by BBC Transcription Services
(which, for anyone who doesn't know, was a commercial arm that essentially did
for radio shows what BBC Enterprises did for television), but as it's of very
minor interest indeed and potentially a rights clearance nightmare chances are
it will remain 'lost' to the majority of fans. So if you have an off-air
recording somewhere by any chance, you know what to do.

And on an unrelated note, if anyone out there has Marvin The Paranoid
Android appearing on Radio 1's Studio B15 in 1982, please could you let me
know? Ta.

Tim Worthington is the author of Fun At One, a history of comedy shows on
BBC Radio 1. You can find out more, and find more nonsense by him, athttp://outonbluesix.wordpress.com